lsid-developer

Hi All,
We are working on the metadata vocabularies for use with LSIDs issued
in the TDWG biodiversity community and I have a question regarding
the Firefox plugin that might have wider implications.
If you use the Firefox plugin to open this example LSID from
IndexFungorum (thanks to Paul Kirk and Kevin Richards)
lsidres:urn:lsid:indexfungorum.org:names:213660
Then you get nicely rendered metadata but if you click on any of the
property names you get very badly rendered RDF (unless you have some
other magic plugin) because the vocabulary used is based on plain old
URL type URIs.
The same happens with some property values (click on ICBN) because
they are also resources identified by URIs - even though they return
RDF.
Some might say that in an LSID world the entities in the vocabulary
should be identified by LSIDs. So if we look at a pubmed example of
this from the Biopathways site:
lsidres:urn:lsid:ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.lsid.biopathways.org:pubmed:12441807
Some of the properties are defined using LSIDs and some use RDF. So
for the naive user (me?) it appears completely random as to what will
happen. Even though the metadata is essentially the same.
It seems clear to me that any LSID client software has to understand
URL type URIs and attempt to render them. We are always going to use
non-LSID type vocabularies in our metadata. In fact the more we use
other peoples vocabularies the better.
So my question is: What should the behavior of an LSID browser be?
If it renders the vocabulary terms identified by other URI types then
it is becoming a full blown semantic web browser - nice but not
trivial to implement.
One suggestion (thanks to Ricardo Pereira) would be to have a tool
tips like approach to these things. One probably doesn't want to
display the whole RDF Schema vocabulary just because some one clicks
on seeAlso link. It would be better to display the documentation of
that item in the vocabulary.
What do you think?
All the best,
Roger
****************************************
Roger Hyam <roger@...>
Biodiversity Information Standards
****************************************

Hello Roger,
> It seems clear to me that any LSID client software has to understand
> URL type URIs and attempt to render them.
The problem with this is these http URLs are not retrieved via the
lsidres: protocol handler, they're handled by Firefox's native http
protocol handler which unfortunately does not display RDF in a reader
friendly manner. It doesn't really make sense for the firefox plugin to
assume all http URLs are rdf, because they could just as easily link to
a html webpage, jpeg imaged etc. Even checking the mime types, one can
only tell that the pages shown are XML.
I can see that it would be helpful to have the capability of opening
arbitrary RDF in the LSID Browser, and I'd be happy to hear feature
suggestions as to how that should be done. It would be pretty simple to
have a right click menu 'open link in RDF browser'. It would be
possible to have script run automatically each time you click a link to
fetch the data, check to see if Firefox could parse it as RDF and then
toss it in the LSID Browser if it did, but that could add quite a bit of
overhead to browsing.
> One suggestion (thanks to Ricardo Pereira) would be to have a tool
> tips like approach to these things. One probably doesn't want to
> display the whole RDF Schema vocabulary just because some one clicks
> on seeAlso link. It would be better to display the documentation of
> that item in the vocabulary.
That would definitely be a great feature, and if anyone over there is
interested in writing it up I'll do my best to get it folded into the
project. Again, one would have to somehow determine that link is to XML
RDF, and that it was a part of a schema. http links could be just as
easily linking to terabytes of binary data, and you wouldn't want to
start a large number of such downloads just by mousing over some URLs!
cheers,
Alyssa

Thanks Alyssa,
I guess my request was fairly impossible.
Would it be possible for the plugin to set the browser in a state
that says "give me initial responsibility for rendering the next link
you follow". The plugin could then take a look at the stream (or even
just the header) and decide whether it wanted to handle it or not. I
have not done any Firefox hacking so may be totally off on this.
Rod's point about adding style sheet instructions to the RDF is a
good one I think I will follow. I had held off this thinking it would
'pollute' the vocabularies but now I think it is a necessity people
come to the vocabs from different directions with their browsers.
Probably better than having Apache detect the browser etc.
I really wanted to raise the point and see if anyone came up with an
idea. If I can think of anything implementable I'll have a go at it
or let you know.
All the best,
Roger
On 4 Jan 2007, at 15:30, Alyssa Wolf wrote:
> Hello Roger,
>
>> It seems clear to me that any LSID client software has to understand
>> URL type URIs and attempt to render them.
>
> The problem with this is these http URLs are not retrieved via the
> lsidres: protocol handler, they're handled by Firefox's native http
> protocol handler which unfortunately does not display RDF in a reader
> friendly manner. It doesn't really make sense for the firefox
> plugin to
> assume all http URLs are rdf, because they could just as easily
> link to
> a html webpage, jpeg imaged etc. Even checking the mime types, one
> can
> only tell that the pages shown are XML.
>
> I can see that it would be helpful to have the capability of opening
> arbitrary RDF in the LSID Browser, and I'd be happy to hear feature
> suggestions as to how that should be done. It would be pretty
> simple to
> have a right click menu 'open link in RDF browser'. It would be
> possible to have script run automatically each time you click a
> link to
> fetch the data, check to see if Firefox could parse it as RDF and then
> toss it in the LSID Browser if it did, but that could add quite a
> bit of
> overhead to browsing.
>
>> One suggestion (thanks to Ricardo Pereira) would be to have a tool
>> tips like approach to these things. One probably doesn't want to
>> display the whole RDF Schema vocabulary just because some one clicks
>> on seeAlso link. It would be better to display the documentation of
>> that item in the vocabulary.
>
> That would definitely be a great feature, and if anyone over there is
> interested in writing it up I'll do my best to get it folded into the
> project. Again, one would have to somehow determine that link is
> to XML
> RDF, and that it was a part of a schema. http links could be just as
> easily linking to terabytes of binary data, and you wouldn't want to
> start a large number of such downloads just by mousing over some URLs!
>
> cheers,
>
> Alyssa
>
>
>
>
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